


Timestream of Consciousness

by endofunctor



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-10
Updated: 2011-07-10
Packaged: 2017-10-21 05:20:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/221363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endofunctor/pseuds/endofunctor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The internal monologue of a robotic ghost shortly before and after her explosion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Timestream of Consciousness

**Author's Note:**

> God, this has been sitting in google docs mostly complete for weeks. Maybe one day I'll write a story that's actually long.

The worst part was, it had all gone exactly according to her plan. The others had all acted according to her plans, coordinating with innumerable versions of herself from branched-off timelines, ensuring that Vriska would die on her quest bed and ascend to god tier, that the numerous inter-troll rivalries would be paused long enough for them to reach the Black King intact and defeat him, crush him with meteors and blast him with energy until his corpse was rent into its constituent data and dispersed into the Incipisphere.

And now there’s purple text in her head telling her of the precise manner of how they’d be doomed, of how the entity that she’d thrown herself at again and again to buy the others precious milliseconds to go through the portal to the Veil would come into their worl. And the worst part of it is that even though she knows all the effects she doesn’t know the causes; knowing everything doesn’t let you know how it all fits together. Her temporal knowledge only shows her what the finished puzzle looks like, not how the pieces all fit.

Maybe she herself _is_ the cause, maybe if she tells this human to stop whatever it is she’s going to do enough, then she will. Maybe it’s the act of being ordered to stop that keeps her going, maybe it’s the mere mention of the act. Maybe the true cause is buried deep in some level of quintuple-reverse psychology. Maybe she can stop it.

She can’t, of course, because you can’t escape the universe from inside it. But the illusion is there and so she runs with it, rewires herself, breaks connections and solders inputs to outputs and outputs to inputs. But paradox space is an unforgiving owner, encoding its entire future state in a single molecule of its own structure and the deterministic circuits in her head can’t even provide her with a convincing illusion of choice let alone the true illusion of control, of autocracy, of freedom from the terrible reign of space and time and quantum determinacy.

Her randomness sources running ragged, running at the end of the timeline of the gears and circuits and silicon that constitute herself and comprise her blue-blood existence, she can't draw entropy from the fixed unchanging past and she's running out of quasi-mutable future and once she runs out

There's a feeling, a feeling of tugging, that she’s about to move and things are going to change, a feeling of a four-space line joining her to some unknown unseeable future and for once in her unlife she's uncertain but she knows what that means.

Knows it's her time.

So she says her goodbyes to the yellowblood, to the one she'd actually liked, with memories that she doesn't need to delve into branching universes to remember, doesn't need to access alternate Alternias to think about. She tries to memorize those red-blue eyes, imprint them on her circuitry and on her consciousness because she has the oddest feeling she won’t get a chance to see them again. But she saw them one last time, which is why she has a smile on her face for the first time in hours as she prepares to

explode.

And in that instant she's formless once again bearing not even the ghost shell of a spirit she once wore, no ribbits or frogs or robotics, just complete and utter soul traveling at superluminal speeds, but she’s not headed towards the dreambubble, she’s headed to

Derse?

 _oh_

And now that she's not trapped by she can feel again without the gray muffling of silicon and glass and steel, feel the body rushing towards her clad in regal purple, stretches out to enter it and intersects and binds and sparks synapses and systole, and she's alive again, alive once more and there's green surrounding her, licking at the fabric of her clothing like a hungry dog but even the spaceless timeless voidfire cannot stop her now that she's become one and whole once more.

There's a grin on her face on her lips in every pulse of her blood, red like her outfit, red like the time that fills her senses and tells her a tale of what is was will be, gives her the knowledge in an instaneous information dump of all that might have happened and all that will be in the predestined preordained prefabricated predicted future.

But at the end of this Pandora’s box of dread certainty comes hope, a point at which the voices go quiet and even paradox space itself is silent. She can see where and when the knowledge ends, where space and time twist themselves in a knot, where phase space becomes singular and and expands in unpredictable ways and the dark pockets become an ocean of the unknown and merge and fill the entirety of the multiverses.

Then she comes back to the present and oh, there's Jack. She can't fight him fair, but she doesn't have to be, because time is hers now, folding and swirling around her in an impenetrable maelstrom that drags space with it. it's all hers, and now he has none left for himself.

It takes all of her energy, all of what she is to hold him, but that's fine because she can use that un-time to plan, to think, to decide. And once she does, once she’s settled into her course of action and seen its consequences, she unfreezes and lets him pass in her around her through her, taking her to the source of his power. She can’t destroy it herself, even with her augmented timesense; she has to wait for the Seer to arrive with her bomb.

But that’s fine, and as she flits her wings and glides into the dreambubbles, she’s smiling. Because there are dreamselves to greet and humans to meet, not because temporal predestination tells her that she will have greeted them, but because she wants to.

For the first time in her life and death and life again, she’s free.


End file.
